Mathemathics Teacher Evan Graber
May 26, 2018

It seems to me that the people who should be giving speeches are those who have done great things.  I haven’t, and, until recently, I never really thought I could.  So, of all the people that could have been chosen to do this, of all the great, experienced people on my right, and many if not all of you in the audience, naturally, I thought I was a poor choice, at first.  I cannot give a speech filled with impressive examples demonstrating the grandeur and effectiveness of the advice and lessons I have to give.  I cannot even tell you if they worked.  I cannot be the light highlighting the path, saying, “this right here is the path to success.”

Much like our graduating class, I’m still on my journey.  I came to realize that this puts me in a perfectly unique position: I’m right there with them, a little ahead of some, but, certainly, behind a few. I can only tell what I think might work, what I know doesn’t work, and what I’m going to try next.

Probably the first thing I should tell you before I start explaining these: I used to be quite weird, when I was a kid… I still am, but I used to be, too.

I was the kid on the playground who, instead of playing sports with his friends, would sit in the grass, more oft alone than not, watching, studying, and paying attention.  I asked many questions from my times on the playground.  Why is it that when someone pulls on a wagon with a ball in it, that the ball moves backwards?  Why is it that the moon, which is apparently a large rock, and the clouds, which are clearly denser than air, do not fall out of the sky?  Why is ice slippery?  Why do the other kids play when there is so much to see?

I brought these questions to my teachers who then turned my inquisitive nature homeward.  My mother turned me to my father, my father, despite being a professor, didn’t have the answers for me.  He turned me towards books (you see, this was before Google).  And, in books, I found, much later of course, the answers I sought.

The ball doesn’t actually move backwards, much.  It’s the cart moving forwards that makes the ball appear it is moving backwards.  Upon close inspection, you can see the ball mostly tries to stay put!

As it turns out, Chicken Little was right—the clouds do “fall”, actually.  Yes, they are denser than air, but, they are still very small and not very heavy.  Much like how a feather will fall slowly, the individual particles in clouds experience the same effect—only it’s worse!  Thermal currents will push them up, just like dust floating through a sunbeam.

Now, the moon has always fascinated me, and the answer here has always filled me with a sense of wonder. The moon is falling. However, due to the way that it was moving, it’s not falling down: it’s falling around.  Solely influenced by its motion and gravity, the moon is in a perpetual state of free fall.

I will spare my students the explanation of ice.  If you’re curious ask them, or, if you want to know—google it.

I’ve not come close to answering why the other kids did not see this.  I think it was my eccentricity that put me in a unique position.  I have felt that it is my duty to share this and point it out to the others, those that couldn’t or didn’t see.  This is something that I think might help.

Now, from all of my time trying, I have come to realize what bad advice sounds like.  The key to success is…. hard work, determination, passion… If you spend extra time on the weekends you will succeed. Success is not a one-size-fits-all type thing. I was always told this, and now, I wish I wasn’t.  Here is what I would have liked to have heard instead.

You will fail.  Maybe this doesn’t seem like the best thing to say, but it’s true. There are going to be somethings that you just suck at.  And, that’s okay.  Failing is not something that is mutually exclusive with being successful, with the understanding that you fail forward. Paulo Coelho wrote in the alchemist, “… If you fall seven times, get up eight. “.  As Juan said, attitude is everything.

This is not something I have done, because it is not something I had ever been told. I wish I had, that would have made many things a lot easier, like, for example finding an appropriate anecdote.

I can, however, turn to history.  Thomas Edison tried hundreds, if not thousands of different variations before his one thousand and first try, in which he developed a functioning, practical incandescent bulb, the precursor to our light bulb.  Theodór Geisel was rejected by somewhere between 20-43 publishers before he published And to Think I saw it on Mulberry Street, under the pseudonym, a household name, Dr. Seuss.

Clearly, these are great men. They knew that failure was as much of a part of being successful as succeeding actually was.  I’ve learned that in my time here, hopefully you will too.